The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when anything that's using some advanced API.
IE was hated after the fact of cornering the whole marketshare and making the web developers build all the websites to work on IE only.
Initially, IE was very innovative browser too and they were the inventor of technologies like Ajax, introduced in IE5. Back in the pre-hate days, the web developers loved IE and it's innovative ways that let them to cool stuff.
Chrome being still innovative doesn't mean much. Once they make sure that websites are built to work in Chrome only, they can relax and stop spending money on it and increase profits and stock prices by rent seeking.
We should probably be glad that Microsoft basically stopped all IE investment when the dot-com crash happened (IE6 came out 2001), if they had kept investing the internet might still be dominated by MS
But yes, ultimately a good thing.
Though the phone fail was a huge fail. Those initial Windows phones were really awesome. These were the ones that competed with Blackberry before Apple took over the market.
Which sounds a lot like Chrome, except closed source. Those considering how big and cumbersome browsers are... does open source that matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Just browser complexity is a HUGE moat, there are probably 5-10 organizations that can sustain leading edge browser development 10+ years.
But if community-developed web browsers were required the complexity wouldn't slow the process down much. It just happens Google does a really good job.
I said browser complexity, not OS complexity.
If a project is too complex for a single organisation, then break it up into 2-3 projects. That is how OSS software handles complex tasks. Someone could do a real LLVM-style browser project then we don't all have to use javascript which'd catapult us all into the 21st century.
This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software.
You can try to close the door on that stable, but the horse that escaped has died of old age it's happened so long ago.
They killed[1] cross platform apps and they made software updates hard, so everyone just flocked to the web.
[1] Not through a single blow, death by a million cuts.
No they didn't! Extremely lazy devs deciding that they should just be able to deploy javascript and html anywhere and using Electron "killed" native apps. Why would anyone ever invest even 1% more into a native app when you can just hire intern javascript kiddies, pay them terribly, oversee them with one or two expensive javascript bros, and all your users will blame the slowdown on the operating system and Microsoft as they always have?
I'd argue each native version costs about as much as an web app.
The real shame was Gtk and Qt not getting the support they deserve.
I, on the other hand, find that "browser as OS" is one of the best things that has happened in recent software history. I can run Photopea anywhere, on any platform that has a decent browser. Absolutely magic!
Also remember the context: Netscape was just as gung-ho with standards as IE and everyone was kind of figuring out what did and didn't work on the fly. To just ossify a standard at some point just made no sense. Good standards respond to what's going on in reality.
Apart from that, IE6 also had massive rendering bugs and no CSS2 support. They only fixed the worst stuff five years later, with IE7. Of course web developers still had to wrestle IE6 for years after that, as its market share declined only slowly.
No one implemented standards back then, and IE WAS the de-facto "standard" as it had something like ~98% market share. I'm not saying standards should have been made bug-compatible with IE or even that they should have gone out of their way to accommodate IE, but stuff like the box model which was 1) actually better (or, at the least, equivalent), and 2) a huge pain for everyone could have just been in a "CSS 2.2".
It would have reduced headaches for everyone, especially non-IE users as the people who suffered the most from this weren't the IE users and devs who only cared about IE, they were the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Opera people and devs who cared about them. One has to wonder if uptake of things like Firefox or Opera wouldn't have been much faster in an alternative universe where these changes were made.
Mindlessly following standards just makes no sense. Also see GNU and POSIX_ME_HARDER/POSIXLY_CORRECT.
This was required for compatibility with Netscape. Developers coded for the Netscape box model when it was dominant, so Microsoft had to follow the same model to prevent the pages from breaking when viewed in Internet Explorer.
Both of them did that. The box model in question was invented by Mozilla (internal code name for Netscape), and Opera 7 also implemented it.
Of the items in the link, only one is “adding functionality”.
The others are (1) not supporting an image file format and (2) removing functionality from extensions.
> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving
IE was also hated for activex along with a number of non-standard extensions added to support Microsoft use cases. See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-anger... for adding new html elements and a new system of dhtml behaviors as an example of syntax only supported by IE.
Making Windows a requirement for the web. Things like ActiveX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX
It doesn't disprove your point, it's just a cute bit of trivia.
I mean, I've had iOS crash while using safari more often than I had windows 98 crash while using IE.
At least back in the IE days, when a user found a site they couldn't open in IE, they could go download firefox.
When a user encounters a websites that doesn't work on iOS safari, they can't download a different browser.
Even worse, when you report the bug to the site owner (say your friend), they'll then say "Oh, sorry, I don't own an iPhone or macbook, so I'd have to pay $800+ to reproduce your bug", while with IE, it ran on basically any computer, and I think windows back then still had a trial version you could use for free.
And with Safari, I can’t test any specific issues because we only have one mac, and it’s old and can’t run a current Safari. The situation is slightly better than with IE, as multiple macOS versions apparently (or so I was told) can run a newer Safari, but still not all.
Netscape had lame <blink> while IE had the very cool <marquee> instead.
Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so.
So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But then you'd open it up in Netscape and you're left wondering "WTF?" because it looked terrible and the images were horribly degraded - intentionally degraded, as it turned out.
You'd open up the page source to figure out what was going on and you'd see a bunch of ActiveX crap for the images that would only work in IE. And, IIRC, the images themselves were BMPs, rather than JPEG or GIF (can't remember if PNG was supported at this point in any browser, but it certainly wasn't by IE or Office apps). So the images would look high quality in IE (and have massive file sizes, because BMP), whereas Netscape and other browsers didn't support ActiveX or BMP so they were just displayed as low-quality (IIRC) GIFs with extremely low colour depth. They could have displayed high quality images if they'd used a more suitable format, like JPEG, but they deliberately chose the most crappy image format, so that photos would look terrible in anything other than IE and people would think IE was a better browser as a result.
Once the EU's antitrust case against Microsoft gained pace, IE development really stalled, and that's when it stopped evolving. This was around the time of late IE4/early IE5 era. You'd be hard pressed to spot any substantive differences between IE5 (released in, what, 1999?) and IE6 (release, I think, in 2001). So then, fast forward to the 2010s and IE6 is still around all over the place: doesn't support PNG, doesn't support HTML5, doesn't support much of CSS, polyfills can only cover up so much, etc.
You had IE7, IE8, and IE9 as well, which were also dogshit (IE9 marginally less so), and didn't implement standards properly or had some MS-centric view of functionality implemented (old habits die hard, even though the battle was lost by that stage).
IE10 was starting to feel like Microsoft were taking web standards seriously, but still didn't support loads of recent APIs (Web Audio springs immediately to mind). Same with IE11: better but still too far off.
Edge was better again but caught in the middle: it still wasn't as good as Chrome and Firefox but now it had also removed all vestiges of IE support, for addins and suchlike, so it had alienated that crowd too.
And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be.
Now you have all the Chromium based browsers (including Brave), and Firefox (which is substantially funded via Google), and there aren't really any other mainstream capable browser engines out there. And, no surprise, Google are abusing their effective monopoly power because that's what effective monopolies always do.
Chrome actually is the new IE because with it Google are doing (much more successfully) what Microsoft tried to do with IE in the late 90s.
And it wasn't just that JavaScript and DOM manipulation were slow: it was incredibly lacking in capabilities. Any kind of basic drawing? Nope. Multimedia support? Nope. Local storage? Nope. Decent networking capability and access to remote APIs? Nope. Good, standardised browser APIs? Nope, and hence the arrival of JQuery, Dojo, et al.
I completely agree with you but Microsoft's approach was deliberately and calculatedly shady.
It also had the nice side effect of being the security equivalent of a sucking chest wound. Flash and Java Applets were bad too (c.f. the famous Java classloader vulnerability, which could be exploited by loading a malicious applet), but they didn't seem to be nearly as bad as the horror that was ActiveX. Perhaps it was because ActiveX was intentionally designed to integrate with the host OS, or because it was more deeply integrated into the browser, but my recollection of ActiveX is that Microsoft never managed to get security right for ActiveX, and the way that ActiveX security was "solved" was by ditching ActiveX entirely.
I personally loath Microsoft, and xame up through the Commodore tract, into Linux. Never could stand the company, their products.
I won't blindly dislike, I had my reasons, but it's been a long time since the early years. So I tried Edge for android, back when Microsoft was going on about not being an ads platform like Google.
I thought, OK, maybe they've ripped out Google's tracking. Made it less invasive, maybe they'll even enable pinch zoom and reflow, like Opera does.
Nope. None of that. And the amount of phone home I saw with tcpdump was mind bogglng.
So sad. They could have taken chrome, made it non-invasive, added pinch zoom and reflow, and lots of other such things. I'd have used it, been happy with it, sing their praises.
But instead, it's the same old, short range, junk.
IE6 was the best for a long time, also it had
VML which it kept in place and didn't move on SVG for a looooonnnnnngggg time, because of course VML was integrated in office products as the vector markup format and probably because it was made in MS.
So they had a vision for a vector image markup, and that was what they did.
SMIL-like extensions to HTML, and the use of behaviors in css were also part of their "vision" https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html
visions, like ideas, are a dime a dozen - in a browser market it matters if your visions are standards because if not they break the web.
IE's visions were not standardized and not supported by other browsers, they tried to instead do an end run around standardization. Chrome is the new IE. Chrome removing JPEG XL seems a pretty good indicator of that.
Also Safari had advanced color profiles before the other browsers, Safari does better work on accessibility than the other browsers, if most web developers thinks Safari is the new IE and Chrome is great then I think they aren't paying more than superficial attention to things.
As an example, take "double margin bug" [1]. It cannot be explained by alternative standards.
I remember there were more bugs of this type, but can't google them quickly.
[1] https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time...
So again on its initial release, IE6 was the best browser. Did it have bugs? You bet! Were those bugs as irritating as the ones in Netscape - well the XSL-T that was generating html for a site once put a p inside of an li and Netscape would blue screen my Windows machine 75% of the time when that happened, unfortunately it turns out you cannot do a quick CSS hack for that.
Apple seem to be better than most at accessibility features and have been since day one. It's a shame that the best in business for accessibility is a private company.
MS seemed to innovate most in breaking hacks that helped to work around their "quirks".
It still has a broad market share, and even Chromium forks are not making a dent. They are evidently doing something right.
They do? That's quite a claim. I work with a number of people who were simply told that installing chrome is part of setting up your computer and don't really have any opinion -- "chrome" is the word for looking at a web page and "chrome is just how computers work". At least for the {desk,lap}top, I think that's the vast majority.
First time seeing it, I personally don't like how much power Google is getting with ownership of Chrome, and they already try to force direction of whole world into places that benefit them at cost of whole mankind (ie wasm, tracking everybody to hell, trying to fight adblocks).
Having 1 core browser and no competition is plain bad, Google wins and everybody else loses down the road. That's enough to get opinion and use Firefox + ublock origin. Getting a better version of Internet via that is a nice bonus.
Yep, for various usability reasons, I used IE as my daily driver until Windows updates disabled it. Never liked Chrome. Using Firefox now.
IE introduced DHTML and made designing webpages way easier than just using the DOM , IE also introduced AJAX. Sure it stagnated at some point but IE contributed a lot to the web.
For all IE's weaknesses, it didn't "make" banks do any such thing. They chose that.
Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective.
Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs to Safari.